ENGL 285 H01 23017

EngLit, Humanities, AIU

Special topics in American literature exemplifying persistent themes of American culture. May be repeated for credit. Content varies by title and semester. Prerequisite: ENGL 101 and 102 or equivalent. FS: 11/04/2015. CL: 2020.

Notes:

The term hybridity, as employed in postcolonial studies, insists that identities and cultures are not pure, stable, or fixed. In this course, we will read multicultural American literature with a particular focus on how various texts demonstrate or grapple with cultural hybridity and related concepts of syncretism, assimilation, forced erasure, and diaspora. We will discuss the texts’ hybridity both in terms of narrative content and in terms of craft. While exploring how these texts engage, dismantle, and blur racial and cultural binaries and hierarchies, we will also critically consider the unevenness in cultural exchange caused by various relations of power and hold space for the force and trauma that often undergirds cultural mixing for refugees, immigrants, and the formerly and currently colonized and enslaved. This course will require a willingness to contemplate multiple, sometimes competing angles, a comfort with slipperiness and nuance, a sort of intellectual fluidity. Even our attachment to the term “hybridity” will be unfixed, as we will punctuate the course with compelling critiques of the concept itself. To this end, the goal of the course isn’t to provide a comprehensive or domineering framework or to become experts in a field, but rather to gain some footing, find some points of entry, and then practice, extensively, the kind of critical engagement that builds and challenges such frameworks. We will read theory and criticism by thinkers including Toni Morrison, Gloria Anzaldúa, Homi K. Bhabha, Stuart Hall, Gayatri Spivak, and Paul Gilroy. Literary texts tentatively include American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang, Brother, I’m Dying by Edwidge Danticat, And the Earth Did Not Devour Him by Tomás Rivera, The Salt Eaters by Toni Cade Bambara, Whereas by Layli Longsoldier, amd LOOK by Solmaz Sharif.